What Does Halloween Director John Carpenter Think of Friday the 13th?

May 28, 2016

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Earlier this week, horror fans got some exciting news when it was announced that John Carpenter is teaming up with Blumhouse for a remake of the filmmaker’s horror classic Halloween. John Carpenter will serve as executive producer alongside Jason Blum, although a director or screenwriter hasn’t come aboard quite yet. While we wait to see what this new version of Michael Myers will look like, the filmmaker recently made some disparaging remarks about the Friday the 13th franchise.

Paramount has been developing a Friday the 13th remake for quite some time, with the studio continually pushing the release date back. The movie is currently set for release on January 13, 2017, but since no director or cast members have been attached, it’s possible this remake may move yet again. John Carpenter recently appeared on the Brett Easton Ellis Podcast, where he was asked to chime in on other horror franchises, like Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Friday the 13th. While John Carpenter had nothing but praise for Texas Chainsaw Massacre, he called Friday the 13th movies “cynical” and “cheap.”

“One springs from an organic idea and has a truly artist’s eye working. And Friday the 13th, I feel, affects me as very cynical. It’s very cynical moviemaking. It just doesn’t rise above its cheapness. I think the reason that all these slasher movies came in the ’80s was a lot of folks said ‘look at that Halloween movie. It was made for peanuts, and look at the money it’s made! We can make money like that. That’s what the teenagers want to see.’ So they just started making them, cranking them out…most of them were awful.”

The Friday the 13th franchise debuted in 1980, just two years after John Carpenter’s classic Halloween was released. The original movie spawned nine sequels, most of which debuted throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, along with the 2003 spinoff Freddy vs Jason and the 2009 Friday the 13th remake. Paramount has been developing a new Friday the 13th for a number of years, with the project said to be found footage at one point, but that idea has been scrapped. The movie is now said to take place in the 80s, and will feature franchise icon Jason as the main slasher.

As for John Carpenter’s Halloween, that franchise was just as lucrative, spawning several sequels until it was rebooted in 2007 with Rob Zombie’s Halloween. The 2009 sequel Halloween II followed, but for the last few years, the follow-up was in limbo. We reported in late 2015 that Dimension had lost the franchise rights, which allowed Blumhouse to pick them up. We’ll have to wait and see what they do with the franchise, so stay tuned. In the meantime, you can listen to John Carpenter’s podcast appearance with Brett Easton Ellis in the player below.